Column | AI cannot be avoided with no possibility

The ‘things you should not do’ category include ‘just after waking up, still without coffee, with thick eyes of sleep, reading an article about developments in AI’. Yet this is exactly what I did on Tuesday morning. I read one substitute from technology expert Gary Marcus about a collaboration between Sam Altman from OpenAi and Jony Io from IO. They want to bring something new to the market that can help you communicate with chatgpt without awkward stuff with telephone or laptop. It would be something for your neck, that monitors where you are and what you say.

Ai is such a subject that I tried to ignore for a long time, because it gives me a frightened and powerless feeling. After all, the possible implications range from ‘I lose my job’ until ‘the earth is destroyed’. But even if it is not so bad with that destruction, there is enough in the here and now that I am disappointed, such as the fact that Chatgpt reads himself, write and discourage himself.

I must honestly say that I have a conservative character and think with every change: « Is that necessary? » I remember that a friend once explained what SMS was. « What is that good for, people can call or email? » I said full of aversion and incomprehension. I had the same response to the arrival of the DVD (we had video tapes?), Facebook (we had Hyves?), The smartphone (we still had the Nokia 3310?) And Instagram (we had Facebook?).

It is reminiscent of one movie From 1998 from documentary maker Frans Bromet, can be seen on YouTube, in which he interviews people about the mobile phone. None of them thought they need a cell phone. « Just send a letter if you want to reach me, » said a young man. The reactions make the viewer of today laugh, but also raise an interesting question: how, and at what time, do you determine whether a technological development is positive? A world without a smartphone is now unthinkable, but nobody missed him before it existed.

I must honestly say that I have a conservative character

With some AI applications, demand is easier than with others. Is artificial intelligence that detects lung cancer early? Yes. Is one thing with which we can talk frictlessly with Chatgpt an asset? More difficult to say, but I think: no. In fact, if you had people well informed in advance, many would be able to vote against the pros and cons. In such a consideration you have an eye for what you lose when you are permanently monitored: privacy, autonomy, thinking capacity, mental peace. But once the thing is there, is worn plenty, and society has changed, you can’t live without it anymore.

Unfortunately I fear that these types of considerations are meaningless, not only because of the power of the tech sector itself, but also because of the will of the majority. People who attach to individualistic values ​​such as freedom, privacy and originality are probably in the minority. Interesting in that context, the column was in this week The Times From James Marriott, about the kind of texts that Chatgpt generates. Although those texts are moderately of quality and generic, with the same kind of sentence constructions, many people love it. Some substantiated substitations generated by AI go viral and moved people to the deepest of their souls. In other words: the slippery and generic of chat texts may not be able to appeal to language purists, if the majority falls in favor, the language purists are unlucky.

Technology has a compelling character in that regard. As a minority, you can have your personal preferences or beliefs in all kinds of areas – you can be a vegetarian, live polyamorous, do not give a hand – but when it comes to technology you have to go along with the majority, otherwise you end up in a social isolation or you lose competition with colleagues.

And then something: also in me, with my conservative nature and individualistic values, there is a struggle between principles and laziness. I accept the cookies, pay with my phone, find the route on Google Maps. If I do take the way of most resistance for principle reasons, it is a conscious choice that takes me trouble every time. In other words: you can still have such strong ideas about something, they usually compete against impulses. You can think ‘yes but my privacy’, or ‘yes but the energy that chatgpt slurps’, but if your whole body screams that you are in a hurry, you will still collapse for the time -saving option. So you can say that even in myself the objections to AI are in the minority: they are unable to cope with the desire for convenience.

The difference between theory and practice is that great: in theory we can think about the usefulness and necessity of AI, in practice it happens to us.

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